Monday, July 09, 2012

From The Nation a look at the evolution of search in the Amazon.com bookstore (The Nation):

The glory soon faded, because the high print orders shrank when the
returns came in. Only a few of the remaining superstores—alas for the
Borders that once graced Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, a monument
of civilization—still offer recondite books, as opposed to their 100,000
usual suspects. But Amazon survived, and evolved, and so did our ways
of working with it. From the start, it transformed one ancient and
tedious task: finding and ordering books for college and university
courses. For decades, university teachers had compiled their reading
lists from the massive, closely printed volumes of Books in Print.
These tools of the teacher’s trade were as infuriating as they were
indispensable. Publishers exist—or so every university teacher secretly
thinks—mostly to take books out of print immediately after you have cast
them to play a central role in your next term’s courses. Printed
catalogs necessarily came out with far too long a lead time to keep
abreast of these decisions, publisher by publisher. You could check your
syllabus as often as you liked against the most recent Books in Print
and still find yourself hung out to dry when, two weeks before the term
started, the university bookstore sent notice that your most important
texts were out of print or out of stock. After the 1979 Thor Power
decision, which prevented publishers from writing down the value of
their inventories for tax purposes, cancellation notices carpeted the
floors of faculty mailrooms every August and January like autumn leaves
in Vallombrosa. Amazon, by contrast, provided information about a book’s
availability as current as the publishers themselves could keep it. A
new distribution system couldn’t solve the underlying problems:
publishers still took good books out of print when they stopped selling
and ratcheted up the price of serious paperbacks until students couldn’t
afford them. Still, by the late 1990s, even if you never bought a
single book from Amazon, you found yourself relying on the information
that this public-spirited firm made freely available.

The above quote is especially interesting to me since as President of Bowker we had to contend with that "public-spirited firm" as our BooksinPrint business became (almost) collateral damage in the expansion of Amazon. Competing with 'free' is never fun.

The New Statesman suggests there's a missed opportunity for British comic book publishers (NS):

While it's not completely crazy to argue that UK box-offices show a
clear appetite for superheroes that domestic properties could capitalise
on, it does make a lot of assumptions that aren't correct. Leaving
aside the fact that cinematic popularity rarely translates into
periodical sales, even in America, then by Abbott's logic there's a
market for domestically-produced transforming robot toys going
completely untapped over here as well. But what could we do to make
British Transformers compete with the real Transformers,
except ghettoise them by making them Brit-specific? British superheroes
suffer exactly that problem – their Britishness becomes the defining
characteristic, crippling their appeal from the start.

Mankell has nothing but praise for Branagh, who asked him for permission to
play therole when they met at a Swedish film festival. He is pleased about
his friend’s knighthood because it acknowledges Branagh’s place in the
pantheon of the great British actors he admires. He ranks Branagh with Sir
Alec Guinness for ability to convey emotion and thought while “listening
into the silence”.

On top of his already prodigious output, Mankell has written a miniseries for
Swedish television about his late father-in-law, Ingmar Bergman. The series,
which will be filmed later this year, is not a pious memorial. Although
Mankell created Wallander before he married Bergman’s daughter Eva, he sees
similar flaws in the two men. “They both refuse to compromise over their
work and they both let their families pay the price.”

I wonder how his own family views his adventures. He has been held at gunpoint
in Africa and in 2010 was briefly reported dead after Israeli forces stormed
a Gaza-bound aid boat he was on. “Maybe I wouldn’t have gone if I’d had
small children. But my children are grown up. No, I don’t think I have
treated my family as badly as Wallander does.”

You are going to have to go a long way to find a literature related story as inane as this one (Departures):

When searching for a summer read—or a smart approach to dressing this
season—look no further than the Great American Novel for inspiration.

Slideshare Presentation Examples

Michael Cairns

Michael Cairns has served as CEO and President of several technology and content-centric business supporting global media publishers, retailers and service providers. He can be reached at michael.cairns@outlook.com and is interested in executive management and consulting, board and/or advisory positions. I am currently Managing Director with Digital Prism Advisors where we advise clients on digital and business transformation.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.